Quotes About Perspective

That's factually crazy...

Don't get me wrong—I enjoy my real life, but I feel about it much the way I do about New York City, my chosen and adored home: I'm always happy to leave, and I'm always happy to come back.

I felt no shame whatsoever in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.

You call them friends, Hannah," Mom lashes out, confronting me from the doorway with hands on hips. "But your connection to them is situational. Years from now you'll look back and marvel at what you could have seen in most of these people.

It was one of those views that make you feel like God for a second.

And it struck him that this was New York: a place that glittered from a distance even when you reached it.

When I'm thirty-four, tonight will be a million years ago, I think–the St. Francis Hotel and the rainy palm tree sounds, Silas with the bandage on his head–and this makes me see how everything now is precious, how someday I'll know I was lucky to be here.

Well, I'm the guy talking. Someone's always doing the talking, just a lot of times you don't know who it is or what their reasons are.

he needed to be young or nothing about him made any sense

He didn't like kids, and parents of kids weren't high on his list, either. It didn't matter how cool you'd been--you had a kid and you were one more sucker spooning goop into an angry little mouth, a guy with pacifiers in his pockets and snot trails on his sleeves and a happy-goofy look Danny could only think was some kind of shock, like those people who sit around cracking jokes after their legs get blown off.

Here we've been thinking we had nothing in common beyond where we happen to be, and all this time we've been doing the same thing: picking up ghosts.

Cooper would never tell Arthur Berringer anything he didn't know, whereas Dexter saw and knew things the old man couldn't afford to, without personal compromise. He was nearer the earth, its salts and minerals, than any Berringer had been in several generations.

We're paying him an awful lot of money to tell us we're wonderful. And then, as if another voice had interposed itself, Nice work if you can get it.

Knowing your latitude and longitude is not the same as knowing where you are.

years. In fact the whole apartment, which six years ago had seemed like a way station to some better place, had ended up solidifying around Sasha, gathering mass and weight, until she felt both mired in it and lucky to have it—as if she not only couldn't move on but didn't want to.

You call them friends, Hannah," Mom lashes out, confronting me from the doorway with hands on hips. "But your connection to them is situational. Years from now you'll look back and marvel at what you could have seen in most of these people." "You're probably right," I say, because Mom's predictions have turned out to be right a surprising number of times. "But in three weeks, when the party is, they'll still be our friends.

The forest is like a sentient creature drawing breath around me. The moon's brightness has a sound. It rings in the sky. I've had a fever, which has been hard, but it has left my mind clearer than before. There's another way of seeing the world, like looking through the bottom of a glass.

I wanted to send a young Charlotte into the world to live a different life from mine.

The sky above the buildings outside their apartment windows is the color of a dusty chalkboard, and the light coming down onto the street is exactly the color of boredom.

We all got into it, cracking walnut shells with our shoes, pulling the sweet white meat from inside while a crowd of our Chinese hosts eyed us with bemused perplexity. "Americans," I imagined them saying, afterward. "The poor sons of bitches have everything in the world, but they've never tasted fresh walnuts.

because at that point, the point at which my acceleration began to reverse, time started running together—there was no more arc of ascension by which to measure it.

Structural Dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them. But

I thought: If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.

Structural Dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.